Creative Recipes

Creative Recipes do you have any? I was going to start this post by saying that the Creative Department was idle. But that is not quite true. I think we are mostly unaware of the ‘creating’ we do in our daily life.

Where am I when I am not in the Creative Space

I spend much of my time in the kitchen -making something. We eat very little food that comes in a package, so I spend quite a bit of time… making something, dinner, breakfast, dessert, or the components of meals. Most of what we eat started with a recipe or flavor profile. We have tweaked or changed it to suit our tastes. That is creativity!

I am blaming the added time in the kitchen on the recent acquisition of a dehydrator. I have discovered that it is so much fun to dry foods. We of course make the usual Sliced Cinnamon Apples and Jerky. For the apples, the preparation is less than an hour and finished in the machine by dinner. Jerky not so much. I can’t leave it alone so I have stopped making it! I have experimented with drying tomatoes, carrots, zucchini, onions, broccoli, beets, citrus, and mushrooms. The powders allow for adding to recipes and opening a world of flavor and fun. Once the dehydrated veggies dry, I grind them into a powder for adding here and there to the foods. What a great way to feed the family more veggies! Even better is that most of the time they don’t even taste them!!!

We do not waste any food these days. Of the parts we don’t use, some goes out to the cows, (yes that is now a plural), and when we have pigs, some goes there, (more pigs will be arriving in the spring), the chickens get the bits they like and the rest to the compost bin. Meat is the only thing that ends up in the actual trash. I could make a vegetable broth from the produce bits, but nah… you have to draw the line somewhere!!!

How is the kitchen similar to sewing?

So where or how does the above tie into Creativity? A recipe is a pattern, with ingredients and amounts just like a pattern for making something, like a quilt or a bag or a dress. We can make it exactly like the pattern or modify it on the fly or after making the first draft. You can change it in so many ways to give it your own twist. The colors, the size, the number of borders, pockets, ruffles, trims, or the arrangement of the blocks or other main elements. A pattern is just the starting point to make it your own!!!

Making up a ‘Table’ recipe

For the Creative Space, I made my tabletop. I am not quite happy with it and may get a new sheet of melamine. The finish was in worse shape than I thought. I was able to inspect it more closely once I got it home from the store. I will live with it for a few weeks/months and make a decision… about replacing it. After working on a 36″ x 45″ table it feels great to spread out! I started with an 8′ sheet and ended up cutting it down to 7 feet long, so the overall size is 48″x84″. The current top is not permanently attached. I have it cleated in place just in case I decide that the top is too rough to stay.

My Letter “Z”

One of the other things I worked on while determining the allocation of the space and workflow was this little Letter! It began as a sample stitch out and left unfinished as a visual. The overall size is about 9 inches square. So far, most of the letters I’ve made use a similar recipe to create. All of the stitching on this little piece is free-motion. I stitched the letter with a green variegated King Tut, a trilobal Rainbows, and a sparkly metallic green and did the free-motion quilting with a solid green cotton thread, (although in the picture it appears variegated).

Do your modify a pattern to make it your own? All the time? Just once? Never?

More Later…. Beth